Friday, January 9, 2015

Year in Review: Top 10 Films

What we do and why we
do it: In one way or another, every film on my Top 10 list deals with these
preoccupations. Several concern artists who continue to practice their craft
despite a world that has moved on or never had a need of them to start. Others
are about faith and how we cling to it or deviate from it because of the
circumstances we encounter. Still more are about love and how we are able to
feel so deeply for those who have hurt us.

Almost none of the
characters in the films on this list planned the events that happen to them.
Instead, they are thrust into situations in which they must act. For some,
their actions are calculated, while others may react without thinking, but
all are defined by how they act and how the people around them cope with the
ramifications.

With one exception,
few of the characters chronicled in these films will change the world with
their decisions, but all this proves is that the little moments can often be
the most devastating. For most of us, the choices we make will affect only
ourselves and those closest to us, but it is that proximity of heart and mind
that makes those choices all the more important. My top 10 films this year are
about how we act when it is not our lives hanging in the balance but our souls.

Five other films
hovering just outside the top 10 that deserve a mention: A Most Wanted Man; Nymphomaniac; Citizenfour; We Are the
Best!; Winter Sleep.

If this were a list of
my favorite films of the year, Lenny Abrahamson’s Frank would
be right at the top. Somewhat divisive among audiences, the film has a rambunctious,
carefree attitude that is simply infectious if you can get on its wavelength.
Though its subject is an underground rock band led by an enigmatic genius, the
film has the audacity to take as its main character a wannabe artist who lacks
the inspiration or talent to create. Seen through this lens, the film becomes a
sharper, more cutting indictment of the world of art, music, and mediocrity

This is not to say the
film is not a tremendous amount of fun from minute one until its poignant
closing moments. As I have mentioned before, Michael Fassbender is unparalleled
as the titular Frank, but the rest of the ensemble is doing amazing work as
well, in particular Maggie Gyllenhaal and Domnhall Gleeson. The music is great,
and there simply was not a film that delighted me more this year or about which
I have thought more often. It is arty, inventive, unassuming, and downright
great.

Paul Thomas Anderson
has never failed to make an interesting film, and despite having nearly 20
years in the feature game, he has never made the same movie twice. Each film is
its own distinct gem, and Inherent Vice is another. Sunny,
breezy, smoked out, and paranoid, this is not only unlike anything Anderson has
tried before – it is unlike anything nearly anyone has tried. Adapting a
densely packed, digression-filled Thomas Pynchon novel, Anderson turns the
story of a private detective in 1970s Southern California into a metaphor for
the failures of the hippie movement to achieve lasting change.

A stellar Joaquin
Phoenix leads a sprawling cast through a hazy story in which the laid-back
attitude is all a put-on. Anxieties run deep in this film as mothers fear for
their children, wives for their husbands, patriots for their country, and just
about everyone for his safety. At the same time, it is an acid-trip love story,
one last feel-good tale to mark the end of feel-good times. Everyone gliding
through the plot seems to have the sense that the party is over, but rather
than retreat, they throw one final rager with Anderson as the master of
ceremonies.

Abel, played by Oscar
Isaac, is an honest man in a dishonest business. A heating-oil magnate in early
1980s New York, he is fighting to keep his company afloat without staining his
soul. The slow-burn drama of writer-director JC Chandor’s latest plays out
against the backdrop of a city that is descending into hell. Abel and his
rivals are desperate to succeed, and we understand why. Success means escape.
At the start, Abel has already moved his family to the suburbs, but the
violence of the city and the corruption of his industry follow him. He soon
realizes he must choose between his conscience and his company.

Chandor is a master at
tightening the screws on his characters, forcing them deeper into the holes
they have dug until they no longer know which way leads back to the light. This
is only Chandor’s third feature, after Margin Call and last
year’s stunning All Is Lost, but already, he has proved himself to
be among the best of his generation. Though set in the ’80s, Chandor’s
preoccupation with modern America shines through in this work as it has in his
previous two films, and the point seems roughly the same: We have lost our way
in the darkness, but hope exists if we are willing to struggle.

Director Jean-Luc
Godard is a giant of cinema. There has never been anyone like him, and there
never will be. Along with his French contemporaries in the 1960s, Godard may as
well have invented the art-house cinema, since if it did not exist before
Godard, they would have had to build it. The most remarkable thing about him is
that he is still innovating, still pushing the boundaries of what is possible
in film, and still challenging audiences and critics to see the world through
his eyes. At 84 years old, Godard has done it again with the equally baffling
and enthralling Goodbye to Language.

I have never said this
before and doubted I ever would, but if you see this film, see it in 3D. While
most 3D plays as a gimmicky parlor trick, the third dimension is essential to
the experience of Goodbye to Language. From his earliest days,
Godard has always advanced a kind of pure cinema, experiential as well as
experimental, and his latest film may be the pinnacle of both in his career.

A difficult sit
technically with a complicated structure, confrontational imagery, and an
assaultive soundtrack, the story may be his most relatable in years, if not entirely
accessible or penetrable. It is enough to say the film is about living beyond
expression and simply taking in the abundance of life while we are able. So, if
the medium remains malleable in Godard’s hands, the message is timeless.

6. Mr. Turner,
directed by Mike Leigh

Art goes in cycles.
What is fashionable today will be gauche tomorrow, and next week, a whole other
set of criteria will be used to judge our world. Depending on the era and the
medium, these cycles have lasted decades or passed in the blink of an eye, but
just as nothing stays popular forever, nothing once popular disappears for
long. History now knows JMW Turner as probably the finest painter to come out
of England, and he enjoyed unparalleled success in the art world for most of
his life. His unfortunate circumstance was to live long enough to fall out of
favor in his own time.

Mike Leigh’s gorgeous
biopic of the notoriously prickly painter, played by a never-better Timothy
Spall, cuts right to the heart of the matter, depicting a world transitioning
from the old ways to the new. A man of the sea, whose paintings often depicted
the coastlines and ships of the world, Turner lives to see trains barreling
through the countryside, making sea travel just a little more irrelevant.
Toward the end of his life, the camera comes along, and Turner’s fear is
palpable.

No longer will his
one-of-kind paintings be the only connection most have to other parts of the
world. Instead, a highly reproducible medium has come to democratize art. At
the same time, the style of painting he pioneered and perfected has fallen out
of favor with the critics and the elites. Turner is a man who devoted his life
to his work, and as his work means less and less to the world, he reflects on
what this says about his life. Films about artists are rarely this honest,
insightful, or downright lovely.

Alejandro González
Iñárritu’s Birdman is another story about an artist but one
with much more modern preoccupations. The film will be remembered for many
things, including the technical achievements of its cinematography, the welcome
return of Michael Keaton to a starring role, and the takedown of the elitist
critical culture, but its cumulative effect is greater than any individual
achievement. As it shocks with its beauty, it cuts with its words and pleads
for understanding from the depths of its thematic soul.

Keaton plays Riggan
Thompson, a washed up actor famous for a superhero he played 20 years ago who
wants to shed that skin and be appreciated as a true artist. To do so, he
mounts his own Broadway adaptation of a Raymond Chandler novel, hoping to earn
critical credibility and revive his fading star. Everything in the deck is
stacked against him, and no one around him believes he will succeed – or that
he should succeed. After all, who is he to adapt Chandler? It is just possible
he is trying to take a shortcut to merit, and the world will see him for the
phony he is.

All the while,
cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki shoots the film to appear as one unbroken
take, meaning that while Thompson believes he is performing a high-wire act, we
know he has already fallen and is spiraling into an abyss. The movie makes
clear that Thompson is no longer a star. He is a meteor falling to Earth, and
though his final descent is tragic, it is magic to behold on the big screen.

The first thing I
picture when I think of Ruben Östlund’s Force Majeure is its blinding white
scenery. I see it when I close my eyes, and immediately, Antonio Vivaldi’s
“Concerto No. 2 in G minor” begins to play. The stage is set for an Ingmar
Bergman-esque marital drama that hides beneath a thin veneer of black comedy.
The bleakness and the humor collide off each other at every twist and turn, and
by the end, you cannot tell if you are shedding tears of relief or crying in a
fit of hysterics.

An almost too-perfect
family vacations in the French Alps. They take group photographs and eat pleasant
lunches and play with new toys, but they stand behind a façade, hiding from the
world and each other. In the most dramatic way possible – an avalanche – the
façade is broken, and all hell breaks loose. They are forced to confront the
lies their family is founded on and made to question whether the lies are
preferable to the alternative.

Östlund’s screenplay
systematically dismantles everything this family knows about its existence,
from the roles of the husband and wife to their relationship with their
children to the institution of marriage itself. They are broken down piece by
piece until they are left with nothing but the shards of a past to which they
wish they could return. Finally, we are back in the harsh cold of a white-out
blizzard, and these people must either trek ceaselessly forward into the
unknown or retreat into the comfort of a time before the darkness came.

The evolution of
Brendan Gleeson’s work with the McDonagh brothers has been a marvel to behold.
It began in Martin McDonagh’s Oscar-winning short film Six Shooter and
transitioned into the pair’s dark hit-man comedy In Bruges. Gleeson
then teamed up with John Michael McDonagh to make the underrated and under-seen The
Guard. This year, Gleeson and John Michael McDonagh came together once
again and produced the best of the lot, Calvary.

It has all the
markings of a McDonagh film, from the uniquely Irish milieu to the pitch-black
comedy to the meditation on faith in a seemingly godless world. However, Calvary
stands out as being two shades darker than anything preceding it and twice as
thoughtful in its spiritual inquest. Gleeson plays a Catholic priest preaching
forgiveness to a world that has given up on the idea. His faithless
parishioners have little practical use for this holy man’s philosophies, and
they are more interested in their next drink at the bar than in drinking the
blood of Christ.

Still, the priest
carries on as a shepherd imparting wisdom and keeping faith amid a flock of
lost sheep. There is no victory to be won. In fact, he has already lost at the
beginning of the story, but his calling is to try, in the face of hate, sin,
and tragedy, to shine light on a bitter, cynical world. Though his journey may
be fruitless, every step of it makes for riveting cinema, the kind to which I
hope Gleeson and the McDonagh brothers continue to devote themselves.

Sometimes, world
events conspire to make a film mean more than it otherwise might. Even without
this context, Selma would be a brilliant film, but for the
times in which we live, it is vital. No other film this year cut deeper than
Ava DuVernay’s politically charged Martin Luther King Jr. biopic. Bold,
confrontational, and impressionistic, Selma would not fit
anyone’s definition of a classic biographical picture. Instead, it is a
snapshot of a movement, of a time in history when change was possible if the
people demanded action.

David Oyelowo embodies
the passion of King as he leads the effort to ensure voting rights for African
Americans in the South in 1965. He is weary from the battles he has already won
and lost, but the fire burns brightly in him, and he is ready for the next
fight. This may not be the historical King, but the film is not a documentary,
and DuVernay gives us the King we need right now. With protests and riots
flaring up across the nation, DuVernay and Oyelowo give us the version of King
who could step off the screen and lead us to a brighter future today – if only
that were possible.

The juxtaposition of
pain and hope in Selma is almost too much to bear. For every
step it takes forward, the movement King leads is beaten two steps back. This
is the reality of progress. There are no giant leaps and few world-changing
moments, but there are small victories that illuminate our path just enough for
us to know there is still a brighter light ahead. We must continue to fight and
break down the walls put up before us. This is the lesson of Selma,
as vital now as it ever was.

Few films are capable
anymore of stunning me into silence. I have seen and experienced a lot at the
cinema and generally am unflappable. Andrey Zvyagintsev’s Leviathan stunned
me. Taking the biblical book of Job as its inspiration, the film is a shot
across the bow of modern and historical Russian politics, skewering everything
from bureaucracy and power to family and faith. It is bleak, oppressive, and
perfect.

Beginning with the
simple story of a man whose home is being repossessed by the local mayor,
Zvyagintsev layers slight upon slight and indignity upon indignity until the
crushing weight of all we witness collapses and suffocates us. Relief does not
come quickly, if at all, for most of the characters. Instead, they are
subjected to a long, slow descent into madness. They are tunneling to hell, and
the more they try to claw their way back out, the more earth they bring down
around them, burying them and pushing them further into the darkness.

There are no heroes,
only shades of villainy, and all innocence is quickly snuffed out by the
ceaseless misery of circumstance. Zvyagintsev creates a world in which no
structure is safe from corruption and no foundation, however sturdy, is safe
from collapse. Those who fight are beaten back down, and those who do not are
beaten down more quickly. At the end of the day, no one is coming to save you –
not your leaders, not your church, not your family. If you are to survive, you
must find the will to do so within yourself before it is too late and that too
is pounded into oblivion.

Thank you for being a
part of Last Cinema Standing’s 2014 Year in Review. Click below to check out
any of our previous Year in Review coverage, and keep coming back as we discuss
this year’s Oscar race and the year in cinema that will be 2015.